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A FOOTNOTE TO THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE POETRY

Yesterday I dropped by my neighborhood junk shop and picked up 3 books for 5 bucks -- 2 early ‘60s reprints of early ‘50s “Peanuts” collections, and a book I probably saw in my childhood but don’t remember, “The MAD Book of Word Power,” by Max Brandel, which came out in 1973. The cover has a classic Alfred E. Neuman portrait, and the MAD logo in red, and the words “WORD POWER” in black block letters, with the leftside stroke of the letter “W” raised up high into a Black Power fist, holding a blue flower. It’s a book of typographical and verbal-visual puns.

Brandel’s book came out at the tail end of the international boom in Concrete Poetry, and constitutes one of the largest and wittiest contributions to it. (Though note: The pleasure provided by his wit on the whole is undercut by a few instances of juvenile sexist & crude ethnic -- racist -- "jokes.")

Concrete poetry combines verbal and visual stimuli to comment on each other. An example from the boom era, by Aram Saroyan, in its entirety:


aaple


The double “a” inspires me to lengthen the vowel when sounding the word; the lengthened vowel opens the mouth, which is what one does when one bites an apple.

Brandel makes full use of the MAD magazine repertoire of images, which puts it right in the mainstream of what critic and poet Charles Bernstein has called Poetry Plastique, an intersection of verbal and visual arts, often produced collaboratively, as for example in the works by avant-garde poet Clark Coolidge and post-abstract-expressionist painter Philip Guston. But some of Brandel’s pieces use solely orthographical puns for their effects. Examples:

Thou sh lt not steaal!

LEST WE FO GET

SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDRE


Poetry Plastique was the name of a retrospective gallery show curated by Bernstein and Jay Sanders a few years ago, with works going back to the 1960s. It had the great flaw of ignoring the graffiti artists from the 1980s up to the present day, who unite virtuoso visual design with often cryptically allusive verbal flair. Brandel is even less likely to make it into the history books about concrete and visual poetry. The poetry perfessers tend to have some unproductive attitudes.